From Asia Times:

Having already impressed the world with the creation of its glittering, international-quality infrastructure, the erstwhile Middle Kingdom has now turned its attention to transforming its universities into world-class institutions.

“Our government realizes the connection between a nation’s overall power and the quality of its higher education,” said Dr Weiying Zhang, assistant president of Peking University.

In this latest bid to raise the country’s global prestige, Chinese universities backed by massive injections of governmental funding are spending billions of dollars to attract top foreign-educated and overseas-born Chinese, building cutting-edge research centers, partnering with the world’s best educational institutions, and developing new programs taught in the international lingua franca – English.